The Sims 3 M1 Mac graphics settings

more screenshots, these are nicer to look at 🙂 the high detail lots setting don't work, wall textures (along with every other texture) are terrible.

@thisisreallyryan  A few things to note here:

• Super Water seems to be an issue, in that its effects aren't present, for everyone using the 64-bit Mac version.
• Map View is always low-resolution in any version of the game.
• Color banding and other artifacts of compressed textures are also present in any version except where someone has an old OS and graphics driver that support dithering.  This is due to the texture files and would require remastering to fix.
• Shadows are similarly pixelated on all or most versions, although it's always been worse in macOS than in Windows.  It's worse on AMD graphics cards than on Nvidia as well, so it's not only about the OS.

For the rest, please delete options.ini, load the game to create a new one, change the graphics settings at the Main Menu, quit, reload, and see how things look.  Please change high-detail lots to no more than 4 and enable edge smoothing and advanced rendering.  Let me know which issues are still present and not explained by the above, for example if only one lot is high-detail at a time.  For that, please also scroll around to see whether your active lot stops being rendered in high-res when another one starts.

For what it's worth, your screenshots look pretty normal for Sims 3 other than the high-detail lots issue.  But it's entirely possible I'm missing some details.

i deleted the options.ini file and i've attached the video of high detail lots issue, it seems to only load one more lot other than the active one when set to 4 (sorry for the horrible quality, size limit :D ). thanks for helping me by the way!

about the textures, i've only played on windows before and (i strongly believe) there's a difference in map view between texture quality high-medium. it was never HQ of course, but my game always acts as the texture quality was set to medium. i distinctly remember the road texture difference between medium-high bc i had to compromise quality for performance on my old computer :D i remember the game looking a LOT better than this in all high settings, especially the map view. though of course, this is a mac version, this is how it usually goes :D i've attached a screen recording screenshot of the road texture switch (the screenshots are taken about 1 seconds apart)

this could very well be just how the game works on mac, i've only played on windows before. i really hope not though

i realized i can't upload .mp4 files ☹️ screenshots were attached instead

I want to say that I'm experiencing the same problem, graphic rules file doesn't work at all (I tried to change shadows to 8k because that would be the most visible change) and no matter what graphic settings you choose they all stay the same. I have them on ultra and the game looks like low on PC

@MACIEJOowaty  Please post a screenshot of all your in-game graphics settings.  Please also double-check that the changes you made to graphicsrules.sgr are still present.

Just so you know, shadows are quite bad in both Mac versions of Sims 3 regardless of settings, so that's not really the best metric.  I'd suggest testing something else instead.

 @puzzlezaddict I can't solve the problem of pixelated shadows even putting 7680 in the graphics rules!! I'm using a Macbook pro M1 

@Valentina_Tedesc  I don't know of any way to fix or improve this in macOS, sorry.

Hey guys, wanted to share what I've found on this, since there's a lot floating around.

Sims 3 for Mac was built against OpenGL, which Apple has been phasing out in favor of Metal. On Apple Silicon that means the game runs through two translation layers at once: Rosetta 2 handling Intel-to-ARM instruction translation, plus whatever's bridging the OpenGL calls over to Metal. That's why performance and stability feel worse than they should.

There's no fix coming from the modding side. Lazy Duchess's performance work on the Windows version came from reverse-engineering that specific binary, and it doesn't carry over. The Mac build is a different binary entirely, so those fixes don't apply here.

I've tested this on an M4 MacBook Pro through both CrossOver and Parallels. Both run about as well as vanilla, unmodded Sims 3 can, with no unusual graphical bugs. But neither lets Sims 3 Settings Setter (S3SS) actually take effect. I got the menu to load in CrossOver and settings would "save," but nothing changed in-game. So you're stuck with classic Sims 3 simulation lag: a steady 140fps one moment, dropping to 35 the next once the game hits its simulation ceiling for me. The CrossOver Sims 3 launcher was also unstable and blocked Store downloads, which is worse than the native port, since at least that launcher's crashes still let you download purchased content from the game menu.

On the Rosetta question specifically: Apple has confirmed it sticks around through macOS 27, and even once macOS 28 pulls most of it, they've said they'll preserve a subset specifically to support older, unmaintained gaming titles that depend on Intel frameworks. That sounds aimed at exactly this kind of game. So we essentially have to keep limping along unless the Sims team steps in.

There's nothing we can do.

Good luck Simmers.

humurusx​  The 64-bit version of Sims 3, as in, the only Mac version currently available, uses Metal, not OpenGL.  There are plenty of issues with this version, but it's not about the API.

Since this thread is several years old now, I'll lock it here.